Strategies for
Survival: Women's Work in the Southern West Virginia Coal
Camps

By Janet W. Greene

Volume 49 (1990), pp. 37-54

It was a hard life [in the coal camps]. I wonder if people
can remember those hard times. It's not a pleasant thought. It's
not something to brag about. But people should remember
it.1

Miners' wives in southern West Virginia's coalfields were an
integral segment of the mining community but have often been
unrecognized for their ability to help their family survive in the
face of unpredictable conditions. This study is an attempt to
spotlight the miner's wife, the difficult conditions she faced in
the coal camps, and the manner in which she confronted housing
problems and inconsistent wages.2

The coal camps were the workplaces of women. Unlike women in
many other industrial areas,3 women in the southern West
Virginia coalfields had few employment opportunities outside the
home between 1900 and 1950.4 However, their primary work
was critical to coal production: they fed the miner, washed his
clothes, took care of him when sick or injured, and raised the
children who would become the next generation of mineworkers. They
added to the family income by performing domestic work for other
families, produced goods for use in the home, and scavenged and
bartered.

This study examines the coal camp as a workplace for women and
explores the working conditions women faced. In the coal camps, as
elsewhere, all houses were not the same; women confronted a variety
of working conditions. Like their husbands, they struggled to make
better lives for themselves and their families.

The primary sources for this study are interviews with the wives
of coal mine workers who lived in company-owned housing in the
southern West Virginia counties of Boone, Fayette, Logan, Kanawha,
McDowell and Raleigh between 1900 and 1950. Most of the interviews
were conducted in the winter of 1989 as part of "Traditions and
Transitions," a public history project sponsored by the West
Virginia Women's Commission and the National Endowment for the
Humanities. Other interviews were drawn from a variety of oral
archives collected in the region between 1970 and 1989. Information
from these oral documents was compared with census records,
photographs, federal reports on coalfield conditions, and secondary
works on the history and industrial development of the region to
produce a portrait of the coal camp as women's
workplace.5

Recently, social historians have revealed that many
working-class households in America in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries utilized unpaid and unacknowledged cash-earning
activities to supplement the family income.6 In
company-owned coal camps where most of the necessities of life,
including food, had to be purchased from the company store, cash
was important. Women's earnings and unpaid work helped the family
survive when wages were low, work was slack, or when the wage
earner was injured, ill or unable to work. Economic fluctuations
haunted the southern West Virginia coalfields, and indeed the
entire coal industry. Scholars have established that employment in
the coal industry steadily declined after 1926. The uncertainty of
miners' incomes was further compounded by individual and
catastrophic disasters which killed and disabled miners during this
entire period.7

In interviews with coal miners' wives who lived in housing owned
by coal companies during those years, women reported that wages
were not stable in the mining life. To meet the challenges of
uncertain wages and work shut-downs, women raised gardens on
available land, preserved food, and, if necessary, sewed underwear
for their children out of flour sacks. Women earned cash by taking
in boarders and laundry, selling butter and eggs, and serving as
bootleggers and prostitutes. They scavenged coal for fuel and sold
coal company scrip for cash. Women worked as clerks in company
stores and as nannies and maids in the homes of company officials,
while others cooked and made beds in company-owned
boardinghouses.8

Although census records do not list most of these activities as
"occupations," they were historically important. Women's work often
helped the family to survive when wages from mining fell short or
disappeared.

Women's workplaces in the southern West Virginia coal camps were
complicated by the existing social and economic conditions.
According to historian David Corbin, the company-controlled economy
of the coal camps of southern West Virginia united the racially and
ethnically diverse work force into open revolt against the coal
companies. He, along with other scholars, including economist
Richard Simon, describes the camps as places of "abject"
exploitation.9 However, when the camps are studied from
the perspective of the women who worked there, two conclusions
become clear; the coal camps were indeed places under the complete
control of company officials, but women and their families were not
passive victims of exploitation. In a variety of ways, miners'
wives maneuvered within the industrial structure imposed upon them
and drew on their resources and ingenuity to struggle for the needs
of their families. Ethel Brewster graphically demonstrates these
conclusions.

The daughter of a miner in Boone County, Ethel Brewster was
thirteen years old when she married a Logan County miner. Their
life together was hard, beginning as it did during the Depression
in the 1930s. Her husband's search for steady work required the
family to move frequently. Each change of housing brought new
working conditions for Mrs. Brewster, and the lack of wages
eventually led her to scavenge for fuel. Brewster stated,

He moved me every place. I lived at Holden and Mud
Fork; I lived all over Rum Creek-that's where Slagle [Coal Company]
is. I'll never forget the moving. You know, then you didn't have
bathrooms in your house. You had to carry water from a pump.
Sometimes you lived a great distance from the pump; sometimes you
lived next door. It was just according to how lucky you was. You
burnt coal. . . cooked with coal. When we lived in coal camps, the
company truck brought it. [After her husband quit working in the
1950s], my lot was I went in the mines and carried [coal] on my
back. It was a worked-out mines [sic]. It was dangerous. A lot of
women had to do it. They were in the same boat I was
in.10

Coal miners' wives who lived in company-owned coal camps between
1900 and 1950 worked in conditions determined primarily by the
needs of industrial production. Housing for miners was built around
the mining equipment, railroad tracks, and coal tipples that filled
the narrow valleys of southern West Virginia. When large-scale
mining operations became common in southern West Virginia in the
1890s, there were few towns and a scattered population engaged in
subsistence farming and lumbering. Much of the work force arrived
between 1890 and 1920 from other parts of West Virginia, other
mining areas of the nation, rural areas in southern and eastern
Europe and the American South.11 Coal companies met the
miners' need for housing by constructing their own towns, called
"camps."

But housing needs were always secondary to the extraction and
transportation needs of the industry. Dwelling for the miners, a
store, mining offices, and perhaps a school and church building
were built in the space remaining after the construction of the
railroad tracks, coke ovens, coal tipple, and other structures
necessary for production. Even as late as 1946, social
investigators reported that some coal camps had no restaurants,
beauty parlors, telephones, laundries, daily papers, drug stores,
or movies, even though these were quite common in nearby
towns.12

The companies exercised complete control over coal camps, which
were an extension of mining operations. In many cases, workers were
required to live in company housing as a condition of employment.
The camps had no governmental structure apart from the company;
they were unincorporated settlements within the counties,
administered and governed for the purpose of coal mining. In the
early decades of the century, some companies dealt harshly with any
behavior that interfered with production, whether union activity,
family squabbles, or drunkenness. They often evicted families as
punishment.13

In considering the coal camps as workplaces, it is useful to
look at their construction as it affected the primary work of
women: cooking, laundry, cleaning, childcare, grocery shopping and
gardening. The size and condition of housing and the water supply
were most important, followed by the fuel for heating and cooking,
technology available for housework, land for gardening, and the
company store and its wares.

In coal camps, houses were assigned to families according to the
type of job the miner held.14 Within the camp, the
family was not an isolated unit, but part of the social structure
of the mining industry. "Aunt Jenny" Wilson described her life in
Logan County camps:

The bigger the job you had, the better the house you
got. They had what they called the bosses' camp, and then they had
a camp for just the coal miners off away from the bosses' camp. And
then on above there was a camp for black people, which was called
the colored camp.15

As part of its control over the mining community, housing
assignments followed the hierarchy of employment. The best houses
were reserved for company officials and their families. Many had
indoor plumbing and running waster as early as 1895.16
Urban historians of Pittsburgh and the Lower East Side of New York
City have noted that working-class neighborhoods often lacked the
sewers, paved streets and running water found in sections of the
city where middle-class and professional people lived.17
In similar fashion, the houses built for miners and their families
in coal camps did not share the modern conveniences provided for
the mine superintendent, the company doctor, store manager, mining
engineer and chief electrician.18

The housing hierarchy described by "Aunt Jenny" Wilson was
typical in the southern coalfields:

My husband made his mine foreman certificate when he
was 22, but he didn't always boss. He was an electrician too, but
what he enjoyed most was runnin' a machine because, back then
[1918], you made more money doing that than you did anything else.
When you was hired as a machine runner, you would live right along
just the same as the coal loaders, track men, and motormen. But
when you was hired as a key man-as boss-you would stand a show to
get a choice house.

The best houses in the camp they called "Silk Stocking Row."
That's where the middle class people lived. You'd live right there
as long as your husband worked at that company. But you better not
let your house get all messed up and dirty around
it.19

As the wife of a skilled worker, Mrs. Wilson developed a
strategy to improve upon her initial housing assignment in the
camps:

You know, if I moved in one of them bad houses, I
wouldn't be there very long until I got a good house. If you wasn't
a troublesome person . . . why then if a better house came empty,
you could go and see about gettin' it.

Some places it was the manager, sometimes you went to the
bookkeeper, and if you was liked, you didn't cause much trouble in
the camp and your husband was a good worker, nine times out of ten,
you would get the house. And that way, I always kept on the good
side of the company until I could get the house I was pitchin'
for.20

This strategy might work for white women whose husbands held
skilled jobs, but for black women and for white women like Ethel
Brewster, whose husbands were hired at more menial jobs, the
options were less flexible.

Nannie Woodson Jones lived in a series of coal camps where her
family was confined to a racially segregated "colored camp." Her
father, a black farm worker from Farmville, Virginia, brought his
family to Page in Fayette County where he worked as a miner before
moving to Taplin in Logan County. There Nannie Woodson married a
miner in 1922, and lived in a series of coal camps as her husband
moved the family in search of better working conditions.

He used to go in the mines or if he just didn't like
the work he'd come out and pack up. He could get a job most
anywhere. He'd go out and get him a job and get him a house and
move. One time he moved me every two or three
months.21

Like most of the women who came to the coalfields in the early
part of this century, Mrs. Jones was from a rural background. Her
work was similar to that on the farm in Virginia. There were,
however, important distinctions between rural life on a farm and
rural life in the industrial environment of the coal camps. On a
farm, whether it was family-owned or a sharecropping arrangement,
the dwelling was usually isolated. In some of the coal camps,
however, homes were as crowded as urban areas, resulting in public
health problems such as polluted water and unhealthy
sewerage.22 Farm families could survive without cash
because they produced their own food. In the coal camps, the
industrial setting and the absence of tillable land hindered the
mine family's ability to produce sufficient food to live on.

Coal dust from coke ovens, steam engines, and coal cars settled
everywhere. Houses were crowded beside railroad tracks and around
tipples. Burning slag smoldered beside some of the homes. In the
early twentieth century, some women recalled that the creeks were
still clear, but after the mid-1920s the ground was black with coal
dust. Children were covered with it; it sifted onto wet wash
hanging on the lines to dry; at times it seemed to block the
sun.23

The coal company controlled maintenance in the camps, which led
to a variety of conditions. One social investigator described the
Raleigh County coal camps in 1923:

If the policy of the company is to provide attractive
houses and clean and wholesome surroundings, it is in an
exceptionally good position to demand and secure immediate response
to its program. If, on the other hand, company standards are below
those of the community, the inhabitants may not take steps to
secure clean streets, for example, or a safe water supply. They
have no redress from conditions which may be intolerable, except to
move to another camp.24

A few coal companies were proud of the living conditions in
their communities and these came to be called "model" camps or
towns. Houses were painted frequently and garbage collected
regularly. Owners of the model towns like Tams in Raleigh County
and Gary in McDowell County sponsored annual garden contests. The
photographs of winning gardens show women standing in front of
neatly-painted houses, surrounded by large and beautiful vegetable
and flower gardens.25

In other towns, company control meant neglect. A 1923
researcher's field notes on the conditions of three adjacent
McDowell County mining camps owned by the same coal company
described a range of conditions:

Repair at Warwick was good houses newer and more
recently painted. Rest were older. At Orkney paint very old often
inside walls dirty, houses some of them leaked, porches & steps
poor; boards often broken. At Harvard houses old, paint dirty,
houses had some leaky roofs some boards gone or holes in floor-not
very bad.26

Generally, the houses reserved for mine officials and more
skilled workers were well-maintained, while the older homes, often
left in tumble-down condition, were assigned to the less-skilled
and black and foreign workers. Houses were painted the same color
and often so infrequently that the coal dust quickly turned them a
uniform grey.27

Women had to confront this dirt, whether they were the wives of
company officials or the wives of miners. Some women fought the
dirt and disrepair valiantly, and others became discouraged. One
woman in Raleigh County told researchers in 1923 that when she
first came to the coalfields, she cleaned the privy assigned to her
house. But the privy was located on the road and used by anyone who
might be passing by. In no time, it was again dirty and unsanitary.
She struggled to keep it clean for a time, but eventually gave
up.28

Some company towns had no garbage collection, and families
either burned garbage or fed it to their livestock, if they owned
any. The rest was tossed in the creek or ditches. Unsanitary
conditions, even in the best camps, resulted from crowded living
conditions and poor drainage; government investigators in 1923 and
1946 reported that on warm summer days the stench from privies and
creekbeds filled with garbage was indescribably offensive. Later
investigators were often surprised by the contrast between
dilapidated exteriors and the cozy homes they
enclosed.29

Women who lived in coal camps during the 1920s described their
efforts to make comfortable homes. Cynthia Cardea Earnest was the
daughter of Italian immigrants who came to McDowell County in 1913.
The family lived in the "foreign" section of Vivian with other
Italians, Russians and Poles. The women cleaned their houses and
beautified the interior. Some of the Italian women even hung
curtains with inserts of handmade lace.30

Gladys Lowe, daughter of a miner who lived at Powellton in
Fayette County, recalled that her mother put up new wallpaper every
year during the 1920s. She painted the woodwork and whitewashed the
exterior of their company house. In the 1930s, the camp changed
ownership and the new company provided wood, glass and paint for
external repairs.31

Women's work in the coal camps was directly affected by the
water supply. Coal dust produced a greasy dirt, which could only be
removed by washing and rinsing several times. Miners were covered
with this dirt at the end of their shifts and, in the absence of a
bath house, his wife or the woman at the boardinghouse where he
lived had to supply the hot water for the bath.

Water purity in the camps was hindered by crowded conditions and
steep mineral-laden hillsides. Investigators for the United States
Coal Commission in 1923 found many wells contaminated by the
drainage from hillside privies. In McDowell County, residents
gathered rainwater rather than use water supplied by the company.
According to the investigators' field notes:

At Harvard one driven well situated in the middle of
hillside with 26 privies above and below it supplied water for all
houses. People didn't like mineral water so used two unprotected
springs which go dry in summer. Catch rain water for washing.
Nearly all use springs.

At Orkney there were 9 drilled wells 4 broken leaving 5 in use
only one considered "good" water others had bad taste &
discolored clothes and pails. Majority of people used springs.

At Warwick water from drilled wells pumped to tank and piped to
houses. All drilled wells have concrete slab at base of pump and
pump screwed down.32

Although many companies supplied water and indoor plumbing to
the houses of mine officials, water purity could be unpredictable.
In 1895, mine superintendent Bert Wright's diary noted that worms
appeared in the water piped into the store manager's house at
Vivian. Rusty water was also a problem as late as the
1940s.33

Most miners' houses built by coal companies before 1920 had no
running water. "Model" coal camps had water pumps located close to
each miner's house, but in many other camps, water had to be
carried from distances of perhaps twenty yards for washing and
cooking.34 "I met my husband at the pump," recalled
Nannie Jones, clearly indicating that in retrospect, romance was
more important to her than the location of the water
supply.35 Other women, including Jenny Wilson, had more
negative memories:

If young women today had to do what the older women
done back then, they would commit suicide. I have washed clothes on
a scrub board 'til the skin would be off my knuckles. Yes, sir. You
carry the water a boil it, and then you take and you wash 'em
through two waters and then you put 'em in and boil 'em, and then
take 'em out of there and put 'em in your rinse wager and rinse 'em
through two waters.36

"I carried water up 75 steps," said Gladys Lowe of her years at
Boomer in Fayette County. "We lived up on a hill and when it rained
you brought half the mountain in with you."37

In a survey of 38,183 family dwellings in 402 company-controlled
communities in West Virginia, only 11.2 percent of the houses had
running water in 1923.38 By 1946, another survey found
that running water and indoor plumbing were commonplace in
coalfield towns, but many company houses lacked these modern
conveniences. Officials told investigators in 1946 that housing had
not been modernized because the mines were nearly worked-out and
would be closed soon. In fact, after 1950 many mines closed and the
work force was cut by 50 percent due to increased
mechanization.39

While the difficulty of obtaining water hindered women's work in
the coalfields, the availability of electricity made a number of
chores easier to perform. Many mining operations required
electricity, and used their power station to provide service to
miners' houses. One survey reported 80 percent of miners' homes in
West Virginia had electricity in the 1920s, at least a decade
before most rural farms in the state.40 Coalfield women
used electricity for ironing, cooking, and washing if the family
could afford to purchase these appliances, which were usually
available at the company store. Despite the availability of
electric stoves, many women were more willing to give up the
washboard than the coal stove. They had learned to cook on
woodburning or coal stoves and the stoves provided both heat and
hot water even if they added more soot and ashes to the air.

Similarly, European immigrant women continued their tradition of
baking in outdoor ovens. The first generation of immigrants who
lived in the coal camps built outdoor ovens like those used in
Italy. Italian immigrants, Concetta Quattrone, who arrived in
McDowell County in 1918, and Cynthia Cardea Earnest joined their
neighbors in making bread in round brick ovens similar to the ones
they had used in Italy. The ovens were built near their houses in
the coal camp at Vivian, presumable by the same European
stonemasons who built the round beehive coke ovens in coal mining
operations throughout southern West Virginia.41

But in times of financial crisis, the washing machine was sold
or repossessed, and women went back to the washboard. Irene Earnest
explained how reverses in the family finances affected her mother's
work:

We got a washing machine in Keystone, and Mama taught
sister Catherine how to run it. But in Hemphill, we had to use a
wash board again. They did a lot of boiling [water] on the stove.
She had a coal stove with a tank on the side of it for hot water.
We didn't have a bathroom in the house. . . We had a coal heater
and a coal stove.42

In many households, carrying coal, like carrying water, was the
work of women and children.43 Coal companies delivered
the coal to miners' houses in the camps, but it still had to be
carried in small scuttles to the house, sometimes up long
hillsides. Removal of ashes was an additional laborious task.

Many women raised small gardens and kept some chickens on the
limited land available in the coal camps. If the camps provided no
space for gardening, some families cleared patches of company-owned
land in the wooded mountainside above the camps and grew
clandestine gardens.

In times when families moved frequently or during strikes,
maintaining a garden and preserving the produce was impossible.
During the Depression of the 1930s these clandestine gardens became
more important for residents of the coal camps, especially for
black and foreign-born families, who owned no "home place" or small
farm in the mountains to return to when the mines were not working.
These gardens were especially important to black families because
more than 90 percent of the black mining population of the southern
West Virginia coalfields lived in company housing.44

Gladys Lowe's family was more self-sufficient than many in the
coal camps. They lived on a "lease," a small farm rented from the
company. It was not as crowded as the camps and had a "garden spot"
where they could raise corn and beans and keep a hog, cow and some
chickens. Her mother canned vegetables, made kraut, milked the
cows, and made butter. Many families kept livestock in the camps
and helped each other butcher hogs in the fall.45

Company stores were frequently the only source of food and
supplies to miners in the coal camps. Purchases could be made with
company currency issued to the miners as pay or on credit against
the miners' future wages. Sometimes when a miner picked up his pay
envelope, there was little or nothing in it after deductions for
housing, coal, work supplies and credit from the company
store.46

Many families were deeply indebted to the store; in many cases,
there was no limit on credit. In a recent article, economist Price
Fishback contends that such a portrait exaggerates the captivity of
the miners whom he contends did not "owe their souls to the company
store."47 He cites as evidence the proximity of towns to
coal camps, which would allow miners and their families to shop
wherever they wished. Proximity does not take several factors into
account, however. If they could manage it, families would shop
elsewhere, but not every camp in southern West Virginia was near a
town. For the most part, family responsibilities made shopping at a
distance difficult because women had to be prepared to send in a
second lunch if the men worked overtime, and supper and hot water
for bathing had to be ready when they came out.48

In 1923, a social investigator noted the following
transportation difficulties in Raleigh County:

Railroad service was infrequent and uncertain. For
example, the single daily train from Beckley to one of the camps,
only about eight miles distant, took over two hours for the run
under the most favorable conditions and was frequently delayed.
Most of the camps were from one half- mile to several miles away
from rough country roads.49

Gladys Lowe said her mother made the all-day trip from Elk Ridge
at Powellton to nearby Montgomery only once or twice a year in the
1920s.50

Even if a town was nearby, having cash to spend presented a
problem because many companies paid employees in scrip. Hemphill, a
coal camp only one mile from Welch, the McDowell County seat, was
an easy walk to town. If a family had only scrip to spend, however,
purchasing outside the coal camp could be difficult. Whenever
possible, miners' families exchanged their scrip for cash. The
small businesses near coal camps would buy scrip, but at only 60
cents for each dollar. Some banks reportedly exchanged at 90 cents
for the dollar.51

Many store managers were friendly and helpful to the miners and
their families and even delivered groceries if the orders were
large enough. The store manager at Vivian went to great trouble to
encourage people to buy at the store. He visited the houses in the
foreign section to take grocery orders from the women who did not
speak English.52

Many women tried to economize at home to avoid debt. Gladys
Lowe's mother declined to shop at the company store, and when the
store manager tried to pressure her, she told him she would shop
where she pleased. Other women were not so outspoken, but they
helped alleviate some of the expense at the company store by
producing goods at home. Many baked bread and biscuits, Italian
women made pasta, and some women made household and clothing
necessities. Others bartered their services by exchanging childcare
for sewing, for example, and helping each other in neighborly ways.
Families with small gardens or no gardens at all had to buy food,
which was expensive because it was shipped from outside the
coalfields.53

When times were hard, women living in coal camps in southern
West Virginia primarily relied on domestic work for extra cash
income.54 They took in boarders and laundry, and packed
lunches for single miners. While many women bartered their
services, others worked for pay. Annie Allen, the daughter of a
black coal miner in Kanawha County, recalled going to work with her
mother as a child. Her mother made beds in a company-owned
boardinghouse during the 1930s.55 More black women in
the bituminous coal communities described themselves as domestic
wage workers than white women, but both black and white women said
they did domestic work for pay.56

While the paid work of the wife often allowed the family to eat
during hard times, it also helped some families get out of mining.
For example, the Quattrone family opened a small independent
grocery store with the help of Concetta's work and savings.
Concetta Quattrone kept several single miners as boarders at her
house in Vivian between 1917 and mid-1920s. She was paid in cash
for cooking their meals, packing their lunches, preparing bath
water, and doing laundry. This was in addition to her routine work
of tending the animals, gardening, cooking and cleaning for her ten
children. Mrs. Quattrone's husband work underground for ten or
twelve years before the couple saved enough money to open their
store.57

Women's work had its own rhythms which were tied to coal
production. For that matter, women's work did not stop during
strike periods, when it was transformed and performed under more
difficult conditions. Gladys Lowe's recollections of a strike in
Fayette County portray these difficulties:

We were evicted during a strike in 1923. The company
cut our power off and gave us notices. . . You had to get out of
the house or go to work. . . We didn't want to break the strike, so
we moved out. There was a strike at Mt. Carbon later. The union
built barracks and tents for striking
miners.58

Coal mining is a dangerous occupation. Like other industrial
occupations, such as iron production and meat-packing, men engaged
in mining historically have had high rates of accidents, injury,
and death.59 When the wage earner was disabled or
killed, the wife worked to earn money for the family. The
single-industry economy of the southern West Virginia coalfields
affected women's ability to earn money as illustrated by Jenny
Wilson:

My husband lived three months after a slate fall
paralyzed him from the waist down in 1939. . .

I had a hard time after that. I wasn't old enough to draw social
security, and there wasn't nothing like black lung, nor none of
that, you see. All I got was state compensation, and, at that time,
it paid $30 for a widow, $5 for each child. I had one child that
drawed it, and buddy I would live on that $35 a month. I would
raise a big garden back there on this hill [Crooked Creek in Logan
County], can up stuff, and then when I could get far enough ahead I
took in washin'. . .

[My husband] had carried $750 insurance, and I took that
insurance and bought this little house. Three rooms, and it was
fallin' in everywhere, no gas, no water, no lights, but I gave $300
for it. I took the rest of the money and fixed it up till you could
live in it. . .

Then my boy, he went in the service, and he made me an
allotment, it was $47 a month. . .

So here I just had the hardest time, but never missed a meal. .
. . I was a good washer. Wash a heapin' basket full for two
dollars. I don't know how much an hour that was. It would take you
about all day to do a washin', and then, about half of the night to
do the ironin'.

My oldest daughter was in high school when her daddy got killed.
She quit school and went to work-doin' housework. My baby one. . .
she was 10. And we went on and I got her through high school, but
buddy, it took work. . . . I thought I would never on earth get old
enough for social security, but I finally got that. Had to wait 22
or 23 years.

But I'd always teach the kids, I'd say, "Listen children, you
have had everything any other miner's children can have, but you
can't have that now. But always hold your head high and just say
"I'm no better than nobody, but I'm as good as anybody." That's the
very way to be.60

The history of the southern West Virginia coalfields, when
considered from the perspective of women's labor, demonstrates the
difficulty of their daily lives. The difficulties ranged from life-
shattering to mundane, from inconsistent wages and work shut-downs
to washing out imbedded coal dust from clothes. Yet, in the midst
of these circumstances, miners' wives adopted strategies to cope
and survive, whether that required working outside the home for
wages or washing and rinsing coal-stained clothes several times to
remove the stubborn dirt. In many ways, women's unrecognized labor
was critical to coal production in the same manner that this work
was vital to their family's happiness. They provided the services
enabling their husbands, brothers and sons to work in the mines,
and as mothers played a major role in continuing the supply of men
to the mines. Any social history of the coalfields that does not
consider the work of women is only half- written, and also an
injustice to those women whose workplace was the coal camp.

ABOUT THE
AUTHOR

Janet Wells Greene, an archivist for the Robert F. Wagner Labor
Archives of the Tamiment Institute Library, New York University,
was an instructor at Bluefield State College and West Virginia
Institute of Technology. She earned masters' degrees in history
from Stanford University and English from Ohio State
University.

3. See, for example, Dorothy Schwieder, Black
Diamonds: Life and Work in Iowa's Coal Mining Communities,
1895-1925 (Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1983); Donald L.
Miller, The Kingdom of Coal: Work, Enterprise and Ethnic
Communities in the Coalfields (Philadelphia: Univ. of
Pennsylvania Press, 1985); Dorothy Schwieder, Joseph Hraba, and
Elmer Schwieder, Buxton: Work and Racial Equality in a Coal
Mining Town (Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1987); John Bodnar,
"Immigration and Modernization: The Case of Slavic Peasants in
Industrial America," Journal of Social History, 9 ( 1975):
44-71, and The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban
America (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985), especially
71-84.

4. Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion, 33-34; Lewis, "From
Peasant to Proletarian," 89; and working mss. by Mary Beth Pudup,
"Women in West Virginia Economic Development," and Frances Hensley,
"Women and Industrial Work in West Virginia."

7. For changes in the coal industry and to impact on life and
work, see John P. David, "Earnings, Health, Safety and
Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners Since the Encouragement of
Mechanization by the United Mine Workers of America" (Ph.D. Diss.,
West Virginia Univ., 1972); Curtis Seltzer, Fire in the Hole:
Miners and Managers in the American Coal Industry (Lexington:
Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1985); Keith Dix, What's a Coal Miner
to Do?: The Mechanization of Coal Mining (Pittsburgh: Univ. of
Pittsburgh Press, 1988); Barbara E. Smith, Digging Our Own
Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle Over Black Lung Disease
(Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1987); and U.S. Senate, 82nd
Congress, Providing for the Welfare of Coal Miners: Hearings
Before the Subcommittee on Mine Safety of the Committee on Labor
and Public Welfare, January 24, 28, 29, and 30, 1952
(Washington: GPO, 1952), 427-43.

58. Lowe interview, March 1972; see also Corbin, Life,
Work, and Rebellion, 87- 101, for a description of strike
activity; and Wilson interview, 1983.

59. Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion, 10, 29-30;
United Mine Workers Journal, March 1986, 24; U.S. Senate
Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Mine Safety, January 1952,
"Providing for the Welfare of Coal Miners," 434-35. For discussions
of health and safety in the iron and meat-packing industries,
see Daniel J. Walkowitz, Worker City, Company Town: Iron
and Cotton Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York,
1855-1884 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1978) and James R.
Barrett, "Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packing House
Workers, 1894-1922" (Ph.D. Diss., Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1981).